


a wonderful caricature of intimacy.

by lovelyorbent



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Begrudging Allies With Benefits, Character Study, First Time, Hate Sex, Hux is Not Nice, Kylo Ren is Not Nice, M/M, Power Bottom Hux, substantially more hate than sex, they've had a discussion about the premature ejaculation thing and it's not allowed anymore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-08
Updated: 2017-03-08
Packaged: 2018-10-01 04:32:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10180808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelyorbent/pseuds/lovelyorbent
Summary: He’s been collecting useless information. And Hux has been creating weaknesses.





	

**Author's Note:**

> me: *disappears for a year, then comes back just to climb into the trash compactor*
> 
> a 5+1 that turned into a terrible hux character study. i've literally written incest on this account that i feel less morally compromised over than this garbage. anyway, throw me into the rancor pit.
> 
> title from the mime sex video

**i.**

The first time is Ren’s first time.

 _Users of the Force_ , he tells himself, _are not hedonists_. That’s why. He does not tell Hux, but Hux knows anyway; that much is plain in the derisive quirk of his thin mouth when the back of his stiffly-starched uniform hits the metal wall of the bedroom. This is the first time Ren has been in control of the encounter since the hiss of the clasps on his mask had echoed in the room, and he doesn’t know what to do with the power.

“If you’re only going to fumble,” Hux drawls, breaking Ren out of his frozen reverie, “Do me a kindness and don’t touch me at all.”

Petulance rises with the blood in his cheeks. “What makes you think I want to touch you?”

Hux’s cold eyes look pointedly down at the hand Ren has spread over his chest, keeping him pinned. His silence is punishing. Ren’s ears pink and he withdraws the touch, jaw clenching so hard it feels as if it might break. He nearly wishes it would. It would distract from Hux, sliding out from between him and the wall without a hint of fear at turning his back on Ren. The painful awkwardness of not knowing what he’s doing.

“Get on the bed,” Hux says, and waits imperiously for obedience. “And keep your hands to yourself.”

 _How am I going to learn if you don’t let me try_ , Ren thinks, and grits his teeth.

“I wouldn’t have taken you for a dawdler, after thirty years of celibacy.”

 _You’d like me to think you’re so cold_ , Ren considers, even though he’s obeying. _You’d like me to think you’re in control._ Except—as his knees hit the edge of the bed and Hux strips off his black gloves and lays them neatly on top of the mask he had ripped off of Ren’s face a few minutes ago, casually disrespecting it—Hux keeps forgetting what he has the power to do.

“Stop talking,” Ren says. “You’re not fooling anyone.”

Hux, stepping out of his boots, looks faintly ridiculous, and Ren grins at the sight just to feel that familiar indignant rage rise in him. _You’d like me to think you’re so cold_ , he thinks again. _But I can feel how angry you are_. “Neither are you,” Hux replies, cutting and chilly, but his fury is coursing through his mind, accompanied by that ever-present tinge of humiliation over feeling the anger at all. “One look at you and anyone can tell no one’s ever laid a hand on you.”

Hux makes it impossible to lie to himself, somehow. _Jedi_ are not hedonists. But he is not a Jedi. He is just thirty and no one before Hux has ever asked. That’s the reason.

His annoyance rears its head again, but not all of it is his. Hux’s mind, still radiating his ire, is also radiating—there, hidden in the maelstrom of anger—lust. Shame. Anticipation. Anxiety. Ren is almost shocked by the strength of the emotions. Each of them is felt keenly, and chaotically, and fully, and each of them is hidden behind that dispassionate face Hux wears when he straddles Ren’s hips on the bed and shoves him into the mattress so they won’t be so close together.

“We’re not so different,” he tells Hux, breathless, and relishes the pinched look it earns him. “You’re just better at hiding it.”

 

**ii.**

Sometimes after they fuck, Hux pulls out a pack of cigarras from the bedside table.

The first time he does it Ren blinks as he ignites the tip with a motion that is so practiced it might be no less natural than breathing, and then keeps blinking as Hux holds in a lungful just long enough for his seaglass eyes to slide closed before he releases the cloud of smoke. It smells like Han Solo’s worthless friends, and Ren wrinkles his nose, irritated for the first time since his mind blanked out during his climax.

“That’s not regulation,” he says.

“While we’re on the subject of regulation,” Hux replies easily, taking another drag, “Neither is your clothing, your weaponry, your hair—I could go on. Would you like the entries arranged by chronological order or by the designation of the regulation they violate?”

“I’m not part of your crew, General.”

“Then _try_ not to lecture me about regulation.”

Ren stares at the ceiling, the high grey steel. The room is cold with all the uncovered steel in it; the entire ship is, and lying there naked he can feel it more keenly than he ever has before. He closes his eyes when the smoke begins to drift into his peripheral view, not wanting to see it, but breathes it in as it flows over him anyway. The dregs go down smoother than Lando Calrissian’s did, confined to the small space of the Falcon, and Ren wonders if Hux smokes something better, or if he himself has just grown up.

The coo from beside him yanks him out of his meandering half-sleep.

“Oh, hello, princess.”

Ren sits up so quickly his bones creak, eyes snapping open. Hux’s voice is uncharacteristically warm, his face unabashedly affectionate. There is smoke encircling his head like a crown.

“Not you, Ren,” he says, not taking his eyes off the orange cat sitting in his lap, whose ear is poking up from between his thin, pale fingers. “You can go. Did he scare you making so much noise, darling?”

 _The master of the Knights of Ren does not gape_ , Ren reminds himself, belatedly taking a moment to be insulted by the last sentence. _The master of the Knights of Ren is never surprised. He always knows what’s coming_. “You have a cat.”

“Good eye,” Hux says, and scoops her against his chest, holding the cigarra carefully away from her. His hair, a shade darker than its usual bright copper with sweat, is precisely the same color as her fur. “I believe I said you could go.”

Another drag on the cigarra. With his disheveled hair, missing trousers, rumpled shirt, and the smoke pouring from between his lips, Hux could be any common soldier. Maybe any man. He does not look the part of General Starkiller, not with his purring cat tucking her face into his neck.

“You’ll get your fur wet,” Hux scolds her, apparently entirely unconcerned with Ren’s continued presence beside him.

 _And you, General, wet with sweat at the junction of your throat, and wet between the thighs from me_ , Ren thinks, and levers himself up from the bed, away from Hux and his breaches of regulation.

 

**iii.**

Ren learns things quickly by necessity.

Despite that, Hux won’t give him even a half-measure of control in bed. He’s demanding. Insulting. He’s controlling, and despite himself, Ren is beginning to like it. He thinks Hux is trying to train him—and worst of all, it’s working. He knows exactly what to do to make Hux approve of his performance.

Mostly, that involves shutting up and doing as he’s told.

There’s something about that that disgusts him. He doesn’t know whether it’s that Hux has such a pathetic need for control or whether it’s that he’s pathetic enough to surrender to it. But it’s repulsive. It’s base. And he knows Hux is angry about it too, and that he also doesn’t know which one of them to be repelled by, and that almost disgusts Ren more, knowing that they feel the same way about it.

He should be better than letting himself be held to the bed by one strong, thin hand while Hux sinks down on his cock, but isn’t.

It’s always like this at the outset: Hux’s delicate features marshaled into expressionlessness, barely twitching in reaction to pleasure. The brief, slight opening of his mouth as he drops down. The quivering of his muscles as he forces them to do as he says.

(Ren grips his trembling thigh and sympathizes with it.)

 _You’re loud enough_ , Ren thinks viciously, once Hux has allowed him to shove him into the mattress and take over at least the rhythm of it, _once you’ve been fucked a little_. After a while his face begins to break, too, although he’s still just as domineering. Fortunately the orders he gives after this point tend to be ones Ren was already inclined to follow, because he just doesn’t look as commanding with his hair falling into his eyes and his back arched in that perfect bow.

 _Everything about you is so kriffing perfect_. The thought is livid. Because Hux isn’t perfect and they both know it. He’s a genocidal maniac who gives orders like he’s some kind of king, and there’s a black hole in him where the good parts of a personality usually go. He’s leagues from perfect. But he acts as if he embodies it. Never an atom out of place. The curve of his back just now as Ren is slamming into him harder than he should be probably describes a quadratic equation. Hux could probably name its terms. He’s _infuriating_.

Hux’s fingers tangle through his hair and yank his head back violently. “Try _aiming_ ,” he hisses, and Ren thinks lovingly, as he has many times before, of putting a hand around that pale neck and choking him to death.

“Yes, _General_ ,” he pants, meaning it mockingly. He hopes it cuts into that shame over needing the control. He hopes it hurts.

But Hux shivers, hand tightening in Ren’s hair. It’s a visceral, full-body response, and those bright eyes widen as the word hits him, and Ren laughs at him.

“You _like_ that,” he says, delighting in the way Hux is far gone enough that the look on his face is plainly murderous instead of blank and neutral.

“ _Ah_ ,” Hux replies, because Ren makes sure to shove back into him just as he opens his mouth. “I’d like it more,” he manages, grit between his perfect teeth in stops and starts, “if you’d _aim_.”

“Of course, General,” Ren intones, and Hux makes a strangled noise.

 

**iv.**

“That was a Jedi game, you know,” Ren tells him, sweeping into Hux’s quarters to find him staring at a dejarik board. The game is half-played.

“Was,” Hux replies, and moves a piece. Then another piece. Then another. He’s playing himself, Ren assumes, and watches him curse as the game ends. A wave of his hand and it resets to that halfway point. He plays through again. It ends with another curse.

Ren sits down opposite him to watch through the eye-slits of the mask. Hux is infinitely more bearable when he doesn’t have to look at all of him at once.

“Don’t touch,” the General says, and plays through from his halfway point again. “You’re early.”

This time when the game ends his razor of a mouth nearly turns upwards.

 _He’s playing with someone else_ , Ren realizes, _not himself. Someone he has to beat. Someone he’s just beat. They just don’t know it yet_. “Who?” he asks, and knows Hux will understand.

“My father,” says Hux crisply. “Now get on the bed. I don’t ask you here for your riveting conversational skill.”

“So why do you ask me here?” Ren asks, and detaches the mask, because Hux won’t touch him until he does. He knows the answer before Hux even thinks it. He just likes hearing it.

“You’re not in my chain of command and I don’t find you utterly physically repellant.”

This isn’t the kind of arrangement where Ren can pull him down by the collar and whisper _talk dirty to me_ in his ear as a joke. That’s the sort of thing Ben Solo might have done, if he had ever grown old enough to be in this situation, but Ben Solo is dead and Kylo Ren doesn’t care about making people laugh and Hux probably doesn’t have a sense of humor, anyway.

“Take off your shirt,” he says instead.

Hux never does. They’ve fucked... enough times that Ren has lost count. But Hux always keeps his regulation-sharp black shirt on. Ren has entertained thoughts that he must have an embarrassing tattoo. Or a third nipple. But instead of demonstrating any kind of hangup about it—Ren was hoping he would show his hand here—he simply shrugs and starts undoing his buttons.

He’s thin and pale. That isn’t surprising. He’s thin and pale everywhere. But it’s especially apparent under his shirt, with his protruding ribs and skinny hips thrown into full definition. Ren has dug his thumbs into those hipbones and he still hadn’t realized until just now how sharp they are.

“Tit for tat, Ren,” Hux says, and Ren recognizes the casual nonchalance of someone who is feeling neither casual nor nonchalant.

 _You hate it_ , he thinks as he throws his cloak onto the floor, another thing he knows drives Hux insane. _The way your body is. You’re not ashamed. But you hate it_.

He collects these little weaknesses. Because he knows Hux is collecting his.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, he spreads one broad hand over the nearly-translucent skin of Hux's chest to drive the stake in. From thumb to pinky, his fingers span nearly the breadth of that slender body Hux loathes.

 

**v.**

Hux puts one of his legs over Ren’s shoulder as if it’s easy, and Ren nearly comes just from the shock of it. (But Hux is even worse, even more himself than usual, when Ren ends it too early. So he doesn’t.) From the low sound Hux makes when his hips jerk involuntarily forward, burying himself to the root again, it’s better for him like this, bent nearly in half.

“ _Harder_ ,” he snarls, and his voice sounds odd, but Ren can’t put his finger on why.

So he just obeys. He still hates that he obeys, but he likes Hux’s willing debasement enough to make up for it. Spread so far open, his knee bent back nearly to his shoulder, he shouldn’t be giving orders, Ren thinks, because even without the Force he would be easy to overpower at this moment.

“Who knew you were so flexible, General?” he asks, trying to be derisive but never quite managing it the way Hux can. It very nearly sounds like a compliment. Paired with Hux’s title, it can’t sting. He kicks himself for not thinking it through.

“How many times,” Hux says, in a tone that is trying desperately to be flat and dull, but instead has a queer modulation to it, “do I have to tell you. I don’t keep you around for your _mouth_.”

There should be a barb there for Ren to use, but there isn’t, because Hux actually doesn’t make a habit of making use of his mouth. He wants it far away from him, generally. Ren is sure it is either germophobia or loathing. Possibly both.

He’s caught on the lilt of Hux’s voice, though. The shape of his tongue around the syllables. What is it that’s so strange?

Hux says, “Didn’t I say harder?” and Ren gets it.

The edges of the words in his mouth are not as exact as usual, but more than that, their shapes are rounder.   Stretched out, cracked open.

His voice sounds _fake_.

Blunt, blaster-calloused fingers rake over the skin of his shoulder, ripping red lines into it. “Put. Your. Back. Into it,” Hux orders, and Ren snags again on the way his tongue teases at rolling the r. The way his t’s are sharpening to points and the vowels are running into each other.

Ren wonders if he’s heard it before and not noticed the artifice it implies. He wonders if Hux trained himself to speak with his usual cadence. If he _practiced_.

 _You’re some backworld hick putting on airs_ , Ren thinks, with ferocious glee, recognizing, after all these years cooped up with Hux, that that neat, precise accent is an affectation. A good one, but not so good here. It wouldn’t be so satisfying if Hux weren’t so condescending, so aristocratically superior, but he is, and Ren is crowing. _You’re a jumped-up low-bred bastard son who grew up dreaming of building empires and laying waste to star systems_.

 _I’m related to more royalty than you’ll ever meet_ , he wants to say, but drives in again instead, because Hux doesn’t know who his family is and it’s stupid to give people like him information like that.

Hux makes a punched-out noise and shakes through his peak with his hand on his cock. He doesn’t know what Ren is thinking. Or he wouldn’t _do that_.

Maddeningly, he manages to look regal even just after the aftershocks end.

 

**\+ o.**

Hux stands as if someone has strapped a ramrod to his back when he’s on the bridge. Feet perfectly shoulder-width. Arms tucked neatly behind his back. Every single hair cemented firmly into place, no button of his unnecessarily complicated uniform daring to break rank.

It’s almost easy to forget all these things Ren knows about him and just see _the General_.

Almost.

Except—

He smells a little like smoke. And there are pads in the shoulders of his uniform. And it’s rare, in Ren’s presence, that that volcanic anger isn’t lurking behind those chilly rube’s eyes.

Behind his mask, Ren draws in a breath that he knows will sound like a death rattle through the vocoder and wonders why he doesn’t feel like grinning. Hux is the most dangerous monster on this ship full of monsters, aside from him, and knowing these things he doesn’t want people to know should feel more powerful than it does just now.

He has to sweep past Hux on his way off the bridge. Tries not to look at him, but Hux’s icy gaze pierces the junction of his neck and shoulder, the rise of his bicep—the two places on his body that bear healing bite marks.

He thinks of Hux’s bloody teeth rising from his flesh. His cloak sits sore on that shoulder today, rubbing roughly against the raw skin.

He’s been collecting useless information. And Hux has been creating weaknesses.

Their footing feels disarmingly equal.

“General,” he says, as he leaves, and could swear Hux’s mouth bends up at one corner.

“Lord Ren,” Hux replies.


End file.
